The title of this blog post was the first thing that came to mind while reflecting on this whole journey. It has been an amazing experience, totally different from everything that I have experienced before, and thus totally rewarding. I have definitely grown as an individual in terms of personal learning, and a lot of my perspectives on learning have changed. One of the things I have enjoyed more about this course, was how each topic led to another, and how in the end, we could connect all the dots together. But if I have to think about the things that I have learned during this journey, I can mention some of the followings:

Different perspectives lead to the best ideas: You know when you come up with an idea and think “Wow, this is the best ever” and sometimes you even become blind to all the risks and disadvantages of that idea. But when you work with different individuals, from different backgrounds, with different levels of experience, one of the best things, is that you are faced with different perspectives, that help you understand more, and do some sort of self reflection.

The benefits of problem-based learning: I had never been part of a course focusing strictly on problem based learning, and therefore could not truly understand the benefits. However, now I can notice how it motivated me to seek for further informations, how to connect it to everything that I learned during the course, how to work with others towards a common goal, and how to develop my problem solving skills.

The importance of both synchronous and asynchronous work: During the course we worked both synchronously (during our weekly meetings) and asynchronously. I feel like that was the perfect mix. During our synchronous meetings, we did a lot of brainstorming, and presented what we had researched on, while during the asynchronous work, we were able to take some more time, and put some more thoughts on the topic.

These are of course only few of the things learned during this course. All the things learned in the course will definitely impact both my learning and teaching practices in the future, especially with regards to blended learning, and all the tools, methods and models that can be used for such learning. Even though I come from a computer science background, there were a lot of tools I had not heard about or used before, that I would consider to be digital tools used for pedagogical purposes, that can deeply affect my teaching and learning in the future.

Coming to an end, I would like to take the chance to also thank all my group members for their invaluable insights into different topics, the facilitators for all their guidance, and all other groups, for their presentations.